Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @07:08PM
from the so-can-prozac dept.

thecarchik writes "While electric-car advocates may avoid the issue, some buyers simply won't choose a plug-in car that can't travel unlimited distances. That's where the Chevy Volt-style range extender comes in, though the Volt adds unlimited range by burning gasoline in a conventional engine to generate electric power. Now, a new type of fuel cell offers the potential for a different kind of range extender, one that removes the enormous practical problem facing hydrogen fuel cells: the lack of a distribution infrastructure to fuel vehicles that require pure hydrogen to feed their fuel cells. Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to shrink the size and lower the operating temperature of a solid-oxide fuel cell by a factor of 10, meaning it could conceivably produce as much power as a car engine but occupy less space. The advances come from new materials for the solid electrolyte, as well as design changes, and the researchers feel they have further avenues for improvement left to explore."

They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler. With the way that things might be going, I wonder if some won't miss their cars making engine sounds, not to mention blind people.

They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler. With the way that things might be going, I wonder if some won't miss their cars making engine sounds, not to mention blind people.

Most noise from a car comes not from the engine, but from the tires (unless you have specifically modified your vehicle to be loud, which is often illegal).Road noise is the main contributor to the overall loudness of a vehicle.

This is (generally) true - at highway speeds, the vast majority of the sound is either aerodynamic or from the tires impacting the road. Even at 25mph/50kmph, you'll get more than enough sound from that to warn pedestrians.

The problem is at parking lot speeds. You don't get much noise at all just moving at 5mph/10kmph. Even with a gas engine, it's mostly the acceleration that provides the noise, the engine revving up, not the engine just running.

Since the main time pedestrians and cars are maneuvering near each other and have significant risk of collision is in precisely those situations, I think the "electric engines don't make enough noise" problem could actually be a legitimate problem. By no means a showstopper or a product-killer - after all, a car is usually a pretty large object, and I for one tend to notice large objects in motion. The solution could be just a simple "noise generator used when moving below X speed" - that would handle the pedestrian problem, without increasing noise in areas where noise is an issue and pedestrians are not.

To a certain extent I agree with you, but you forget a few relevant points. They are working to make internal combustion cars much quieter, mostly for the comfort of the users. I have encountered a few cars (non-electric gas suckers) that when at those "parking lot speeds", the tires make more noise than the engine, and that's not even on gravel. Of course, the background noise of the city is primarily what is masking it. Of course, if you damp down the city noise by silencing so many motors, how much easie

By the way, in this city, the crosswalks have noise makers for blind or visually impaired people, and you aren't allowed to cross against the light, even if you can't see it. So I guess the biggest threat from a totally silent car would be if they didn't watch where they were going when a blind person tried to cross the street illegally against the light.

First time I've heard of a place where you can't make right turns on a green light.

There's a few jurisdictions in N. America where it is illegal to make a right on a green light and the corresponding left if the streets are one way. Actually according to Wikipedia, those jurisdictions that didn't used to allow a right turn on red have all updated to allowing it excepting New York City, Montreal, and most of Mexico.Only 37 States seem to allow the left on red if one way though and the rules vary.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_turn_on_red [wikipedia.org]

You know, I think the big problem with cars is people not looking out when they're going to cross the street. I say we let darwin be darwin, and if someone is getting eaten by a car. It's doing the gene pool a favor.

I wasn't suggesting it is the first time it's been proposed... I just think that the whole proposal is idiotic.

Good mufflers make the engine on most modern cars are silent enough that a pedestrian is not generally liable to hear the engine on a moving car at all unless the driver is revving the engine.

In my experience, the loudest sound on a moving automobile is the sound of the tires on the road, and as a pedestrian, that's almost always what I hear first, unless the car is an older one or else the mu

There are several people around here in fast electric wheelchairs on some of the roads, including an elderly couple that go everywhere together. I haven't actually clocked them, but I'm pretty sure they get up to about 30mph. They've got red pennant flags on antenna poles to make sure the cars can see them.

Of course... but people seem to want to bitch about how silent electric cars are... My point is that there are other things that are just as silent that we don't feel any compunction to add noisemakers to, why should we do so for cars, particularly when you actually *CAN* hear one anyways?

Already done (I think it's US Federal Law). Our Leaf thankfully has a switch to turn off the "chime...chime...chime" that I'm sure our neighbors would otherwise never tire of hearing every time we back out of the garage. There's also supposed to be a noise (switchable as well) emitted moving forward below 19mph, though I can't hear it from inside the car.

I switch off the noisy merry-making when I think about it, and I haven't mowed down any pedestrians yet. I can't tell if it makes any difference in ped beh

You never really stop and realize how terrible most drivers are at yielding to others until you almost get hit/run over by one that should have done so for you. Cross-walk signs and lights may as well be invisible in most places for about as often as drivers will stop for them.

The trouble is lack of enforcement. For some reasons all our police forces seem to want to do is park someplace point a radar gun at passing traffic to catch speeders. I don't have any evidence to back this up but I find it almost impossible to accept that pestering people doing 10mpg over the posted speed on highways and major thoroughfares offers as much in the way of safety gains as stricter observation and enforcement of other traffic laws would.

They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler.

Harley engines get the "right" sound out of the muffler because of their unique firing pattern.The cyclinders do not fire every 180 degrees, instead they fire every 315 and 405 degrees of crankshaft turn.

It's funny how we have electric cars today, but all the technology that'll make them a true replacement for ICE is 5~20 years away.And internal combustion hasn't really been pushed to its maximum efficiency yet, so who knows how long it'll actually take.

ICE can't be pushed anymore without using higher quality fuels.
Tell me how much it'll cost to fill your car with methanol. You will be able in increase the compression ratio and add a turbo charger as well to increase the efficiency of your ICE. Its just not practical to use methanol in cars.

My car was designed to use 100 octane petrol that's available in Japan, but in NZ we don't have that. The ECU compensates for this by retarding the timing so it doesn't knock, lowering the efficiency of the engine.

They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler. With the way that things might be going, I wonder if some won't miss their cars making engine sounds, not to mention blind people.

At first glance, the summary fails to say how this development (which appears to make demand more likely) manages to ease the problems on the supply-side of the hydrogen fuel cell option.
What it didn't include is the information that a solid oxide fuel cell can conceivably burn any hydrocarbon fuel stock. TFA mentions gasoline, diesel, natural gas and propane. The idea is that a fuel cell extracts more energy from hydrocarbon fuels than the pitiful 25% claimed for ICE technology.
What isn't stated is whether this new fuel cell can handle any of the hydrocarbon fuels without any hardware changes. e.g. pipe in propane or natural gas or supply liquid diesel or gasoline for either gas or liquid based fuelling.

Additives are going to kill it. The article is notably silent about the additives. In a lab they can feed the fuel cell "pure" gasoline or "pure" diesel and show it can work. Or feed it stock fuels, show it works and ask the graduate students slogging at minimum wage to dismantle the stack and clean it for the next demo. But in reality the fuel at the pump has detergents to prevent fuel injector fouling, anti-freeze to prevent water-contamination leading ice formation in the fuel lines, and a host of other additives to prevent evaporation etc etc. All these are not hydro carbons. If you don't burn them at high temperatures and flush them out using air flow, they will be deposited on the fuel cell surfaces.

Technically the pumps can store pure hydro carbons and mix them with additives at the delivery nozzle, the way the mix 87 and 93 octane fuel to create 90 octane. But it is still a major infrastructure upgrade.

Despite all this, if the technology bears out, it would be a great thing. But let us not raise our hopes prematurely, only to seem them smashed down, yet another time.

I'm shocked that nobody else queried what reducing the operating temperature by a factor of 10 means. Let's say the operating temperature was 470 Kelvin. The new operating temperature would, therefore, be 47K, or -226C. Reduce it by another factor of 2 or so and you could run it on liquid hydrogen.

Doesn't this just turn your EV into a less-efficient gasoline-powered vehicle?

There's a common misconception that because an EV puts out no emissions, that it's 100% clean. And that because electric motors are 80%-90% efficient, EVs are 80%-90% efficient.

About 2/3rds of electricity is generated from fossil fuels, burned in power stations operating at about 40% efficiency. So if you can get the efficiency of this gizmo high enough, you could actually exceed the overall efficiency of plug-in EVs. The t

Depends entirely where you live and what you've set up. If you have solar panels/geothermal/whatever or live in one of the better (luckier?) countries of the world on the energy front, you can do much better than ~10% renewables.

I would rather power my car with American coal, gas, or nukes, than with imported oil. Though LFTRs would be my first choice, if there's a chicken-and-egg problem, I say just pick one and fucking start with vehicular electrification already.

First of all, you're ignoring the amount of energy required to import and refine the gasoline. I've heard estimates as high as 8kWh per gallon for refining. Most of the power plants in the country use coal, which doesn't have an energy intensive refining process.

Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that 40% of electric vehicle owners have solar panels. This negates that pesky coal power plant and its transmission deficiencies.

If you compare the efficiency of the vehicle itself, when you put electricity into an EV, it is 85%+ efficient. If you put gasoline into a car, it is 25% efficient (max). With a gasoline car, no matter what technology comes out, that vehicle will never be more than 25% efficient. With an EV, if you want to have a green car, you can buy solar panels and charge your car that way. Or you can live in an area with wind, solar, geothermal, or nuclear sources (Southern California) and offset pollution that way. Or you can join a program with your electricity provider, and pay a little extra, and get a higher percentage of your electricity from renewable sources.

It turns it into a MORE efficient gasoline-powered vehicle when you're on a long trip. The fuel cell is better than a portable heat engine at burning fuel into electric power. (Perhaps even more efficient at converting fuel into shaft HP after converting the electricity, vs. going straight from an engine through a transmission). And you still have all the braking-scavenging advantages of a hybrid.

It's still an EVEN MORE efficient whatever-the-grid-is-using-powered vehicle when the trip is short enough to

For city driving, you'd presumably get the usual benefits such as no need for idling at stop lights/signs, regenerative braking and so on. Those efficiencies over conventional fossil fuel vehicles shouldn't be ignored.

Actually that's pretty much what you can expect to happen if it's viable. You'll still end up owning a hybrid of some sort, since being able to warm up the fuel-cell will still be necessary, and chances are a reserve battery of some sort would be needed to deal with the lag of the fuel cell in ramping it's output up and down to match demand (Toyota has a lot of literature on this, it's pretty much the real reason they developed the technology for the Prius at all - they realized they needed the electric mot

Also, without some kind of "peaking store" you'd need an enormous fuel cell to handle the short high-acceleration periods such as starting from a dead stop.

With a peaking store (such as batteries or a flywheel) and regenerative braking you only need to handle the uphill cruising load, with regenerative braking plus charging while "idling" before the start or restart handling the higher loads of variable speed operation.

You're talking about a factor of fifteen or so in fuel cell size and weight, nearly that

I would love for that sort of breakthrough to happen, but I'm skeptical. Maybe it gets better MPG, but at a much higher price per gallon?

It's the high upfront cost that gets you, since the only functioning models are one offs in this lab. If (and as always, it's a big one) they can work out mass production of it, you probably will see it replacing ICEs

I guess it depends on how efficient the fuel cell is. The last link in the summary says "internal combustion engines only transform a quarter of the energy content of gasoline into torque to a car's wheels. The new design could, theoretically, double that figure." So, theoretically, very theoretically, this new fuel cell design could enable a vehicle like the Chevy Volt to go twice as far on a gallon of gasoline as one using an ICE. Maybe more, since because it wouldn't need as large a gas tank and the f

Temperature is actually more important than the energy density in this case. At 650C never mind 900C, you'll still have a lot of trouble with heat--material have an unfortunate tendency to expand and warp (or, worse, snap) at that kind of temperature. Thus, you may be able to turn your car on and off only dozens of times before the SOFC breaks down. This is the real reason why SOFC has never been seriously considered for cars--SOFC has always been relatively compact for the amount of energy they produce (except for the apparatus you'd need to get rid of the huge amounts of heat).

Now, 650C is easy, at least if you are using natural gas as feedstock. (Gasoline may be somewhat more difficult, but not impossible.) Other solid oxide fuel cells that are trying to enter the market operate at or near that temperature range. 350C, though--wow. That will be remarkable, and may indeed be able to brings in an era of fuel cell vehicles, but it'll involve whole new set of chemistry, and I won't believe it until I see it.

Turbo EGTs can run 800+C regularly underhood, and presumably having some sort of insulated molten salt to retain heat would be helpful for reducing load on the battery and improving startup times.. The engineering to have those temps in automotive applications has been done (though the molten salt probably hasn't), and with a large enough battery pack, it shouldn't be a huge issue getting, say, a 20x20cm fuel cell core to fit in the space of, say, a transverse V6..

This is basically how they think the Bloombox fuel cells shown on 60 minutes last year works. Bloom is how start-up in Silicon Valley with prototypes powering several buildings there. Except the Science article says their technology is five times more space-efficient. A 5' by 5" plate could generate 50W to 100W for a portable computer. 10 of these plates could run a military backpack or appliance. 100 could power a car or house. 500 an office building.

I think the idea is that it solves the chicken and egg problem: people won't buy fuel cell cars until there's a network of hydrogen supply stations, and it's not worth having a network of hydrogen supply stations until people buy fuel cell cars. With this invention people don't have to worry about having a hydrogen network, because they can just put gas in it. Then we can develop an appropriate hydrogen network because there are cars on the road with fuel cells in them.

the article is entirely missing the point. range extension doesn't help if the vehicle into which the range extension is placed is massively inefficient. that means that you need to fix the problems associated with standard vehicle designs (box and wedge shapes) in order to get the aerodynamics losses cut by at least 50%, and you need to cut the weight by over 70% (1.5 to 2.0 tonnes down to 350kg) in order to be able to take advantage of hard compound "ECO" tyres, which would otherwise rapidly wear out on a "standard" car. once the aerodynamics are efficient and the weight is low, "range extension" actually provides enough power to run the vehicle pretty much directly. see http://lkcl.net/ev [lkcl.net] for details.

Nobody is buying a 350kg vehicle with room for 4. It's either too dangerous or too expensive.

both of those assumptions are wildly wrong! you simply cannot have a 350kg vehicle be more expensive than a 1500kg vehicle, just based on the quantity of materials alone - unless you've done something daft like use carbon fibre or a research-based material that is not yet in mass-production [which you simply do not need to do]

The point of a range extender is to provide extra range for that 1% of your trips that cannot be made on a single battery charge. A lot of people, myself included, would be able to use an electric vehicle with a 350km range for the vast majority of our trips. But there's still that 1% trips that are longer, which is why people might hold off on going electric. That's where the range extender comes in... and to serve its purpose, it doesn't need to be all that efficient since you won't even be using it mo

the article is entirely missing the point. range extension doesn't help if the vehicle into which the range extension is placed is massively inefficient. that means that you need to fix the problems associated with standard vehicle designs (box and wedge shapes) in order to get the aerodynamics losses cut by at least 50%, and you need to cut the weight by over 70% (1.5 to 2.0 tonnes down to 350kg) in order to be able to take advantage of hard compound "ECO" tyres, which would otherwise rapidly wear out on a "standard" car. once the aerodynamics are efficient and the weight is low, "range extension" actually provides enough power to run the vehicle pretty much directly. see http://lkcl.net/ev [lkcl.net] for details.

First, adjust your view of what it means to get the best aerodynamics. The Mercedes Boxfish car (http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mercedes+boxfish+car&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) does better than nearly any car out there for fuel efficiency - especially when compared in the same engine type, and would not meet what you say - it's very boxy in front and wedge-like in back.

Second, if you want to reduce weight then you need to use stronger materials. Those materials are likely

Last I checked, gasoline-powered vehicles don't have an "unlimited" range either. It may be an order of magnitude farther before you have to fill up a gas car than you have to recharge an electric, or somesuch, but that's still far from "unlimited."

Last I checked, gasoline-powered vehicles don't have an "unlimited" range either. It may be an order of magnitude farther before you have to fill up a gas car than you have to recharge an electric, or somesuch, but that's still far from "unlimited."

The point is that a gasoline-powered vehicle can be refilled in a short enough time that it doesn't really matter that the range on a single tank of gas is "only" 400km. If an "alternative" powered vehicle could be refilled in a similar amount of time (and if the infrastructure needed to support that refilling system was widespread) then it could also be considered to have "unlimited" range. Currently pure electric and hydrogen powered vehicles do not have the infrastructure (and for the electric the time-to-refill is generally thought of as being too great.)

I once did the math to figure out the rate of power transferred into my fuel tank whenever I gassed up my truck. Then I did the math to figure out some possible volt and ampere combinations that would create an equivalent power transfer rate. I then took a few of the more "practical" combinations and figured out about how big the electrical conductors would have to be to meet federal ampacity requirements and estimate the distance required between the conductors to prevent arcing. The math is not difficu

Go ahead and do the math to figure out the power that can be transferred in a common filling station fuel pump

According to wikipedia a standard pump does about 10 gallons per minuite and a gallon of gasoline contains about 132 megajoules per gallon. So we are taking a transfer rate of about 1320 megajoules per minuite wihch works out to 22 megawatts. EEK

I'll assume your 3 megawatt estimation is correct and play around with that number for a bit.

In the electric cars I've seen the battery packs are rated at somewhere around 100 volts. To get 3,000,000 watts from 100 volts one would need a conductor capable of carrying 30,000 amps. I tried to look up how big of a conductor that would have to be but the charts I have stop at 2000 amps.

Since the charts I have in reach stop at 2000 amps I'll use that for a maximum amperes. That means the car charger would hav

I get about 390-410WH/mi in my Volt, which (assuming 33KW/gallon) is about 80MPG. That's actually a bit lower "mileage" than I could get, but I have a bit of a heavy foot. Assuming an 80% efficiency in the fuel cell, that'd be 64MPG, roughly double the mileage of a comparably-sized and -equipped car.

You presumably failed to notice the part where the fuel cell is likely to be powered by gasoline?

And apparently you failed to notice that the gasoline cell is only an emergency backup.

I've rented a Volt twice now when traveling, and never had a problem finding a charging station. They're in mall lots, gas stations, next to Walgreens, and in lots of places you would never expect. For someone who lives in an urban or suburban setting, you could go for the life of the car without having to use a drop of gasoline. Plus, they are really nice cars. You get in and you realize how far Chevy has come. I can remember driving a piece of shit Citation back in the 90s and my dad had a Lumina, and they weren't nearly as nice as similarly priced Japanese cars. The Volt is awfully nice in a way that American cars have seldom been.

I'm not ready to buy a Volt because they're still way too expensive. Sort of like the first nice tablets or the first generations of SSD drives or a certain big-name desktop computer with dual Xeon processors. But now you can build dual-Xeon box with a pair of good size SSD drives for less than half the price of those first aluminum-boxed shiny "Pro" desktop computers. And there are capacitive-touch tablets coming out of China with the HD video out and SD slots and Ice Cream Sandwich and all that stuff for about 1/4 the price of those first fancy-pants tablets without SD slots.

It's just a matter of time. The end of fossil fuel dominance is coming, whether or not you like it and whether or not the guy who talks on AM radio says it will never happen. Those oil fields are not refilling themselves and there are more and more smart people thinking in terms of technologies for transportation that do not involve the 200 year-old internal combustion engine. Your squeezing your butt cheeks together is not going to stop progress.

I just want to point out that you put these two sentences end-to-end: "The Volt is awfully nice in a way that American cars have seldom been. I'm not ready to buy a Volt because they're still way too expensive."

Funny that.

That's not to say that I'm anti-Volt or anything. I think it's exactly the right next step in the evolution of the automobile.

Why is it funny? In the same way I could say, the iPad 2 is nice in ways that a lot of tablets from American companies have not been. I'm not ready to buy one yet because they're still way too expensive."

There is no discrepancy between something being "nice" and "still too expensive" especially when talking about technology. 18 months ago, SSD drives were nice but way too expensive for me. Today, they are not.

I share your belief that the end of fossil fuel dominance is coming. I also believe that hydrocarbons will be with us for a very long time. We've got military tanks, trucks, ships, jet fighters, bombers, transports, and so on that run on hydrocarbons. All of these have a useful lifespan measured in decades. Many of these military vehicles will have crew that have not even been born yet, for some of them their mothers have not even been born yet. I believe we will see a rise of synthesized fuels to repl

This is still significant technology. Solid-oxide fuel cells are on the order of 80%+ efficient. Combined with an electric motor they handily beat any internal combustion engine you might fit in a car. They have less moving parts, they're basically silent to operate. It's all the benefits of hydrocarbon fuel without the downsides (sans CO2, but even that uses less).

Since we're also talking a purely electrical connection, it means we can also think about modularizing the powertrain - i.e. power source and motive force can be effectively isolated, and the power source interchanged. For a move away from fossil fuels that's huge - if people can own vehicles which mean they can switch between short-haul batteries and long-haul hydrocarbon, that's almost a solved problem - since once the economics of batteries become favorable, market-forces will end up with people using them most of the time.

Not to mention, it would mean biofuels go back on the table - the power source of choice for long-haul travel, if short-haul only needs batteries.

I made no claim otherwise. I'm just recognizing that even if (or when) we run out of dead dinosaurs to burn we will still have hydrocarbons powering our economy.

"Significant" is one thing, "practical" is another. This technology is still going to have to compete with internal combustion engines for power output, longevity, cost, weight, safety, and so on. I believe we are still a long way from fuel cell powered cars.

Not to mention, it would mean biofuels go back on the table - the power source of choice for long-haul travel, if short-haul only needs batteries.

Not so fast. If these things can burn gasoline, fuel oil, propane, etc. then they can pr

We've got military tanks, trucks, ships, jet fighters, bombers, transports, and so on that run on hydrocarbons.

The US Military is the sector of our society that is moving to renewable energy the fastest. They see the writing on the energy wall regarding fossil fuels.

Of course, like with most things, the military is doing it in the most expensive way possible ($400/gal biodiesel jet fuel!) but like with most things, those technologies are going to eventually migrate to the civilian economy.

I hate to be a devil's advocate (and please prove me wrong on this), but I don't really see a changeover from fossil fuels as the primary means of energy use. In fact, I see more dependence on fossil fuels as time goes on. A couple examples:

The wholesale exodus from nuclear power generation. France is having people break into their plants, a number of countries are shuttering their reactors, and here in the US, there has not been a single new power reactor built or renovated since Three Mile Island.

Where do you live? Because, I have traveled extensively around the country, and I have never even seen a single charging station.

Chicago, IL.

You may have passed one and not even known it. They're not much bigger than the little kiosk that you use to put air in your tires at the gas station. Maybe you're looking for something the size of a gas station.

For example, the closest one to my house is the one in the parking lot of the drug store. I never noticed it until I rented the Volt and googled "ev chargin

I live North West of Boston. The closest charge station to where I live is the next town over. There are none listed in Maine, none listed near where I work in Framingham, and none listed in the Nashua, NH area. Plus, there are none in Atlantic Canada (where I am originally from), maybe due to the cold winters.

The only way to not depend on fossils is nuclear energy, with new fission methods

Is that because the age of technological advances and innovation has come to an end?

I'm curious as to why you would think that.

As always, it surprises me when a group of technophiles like/. readers, who readily accept human migration into space as an inevitability and manned mars missions and beyond without batting an eye, can't even imagine there ever being any innovation in the area of energy production and distribution. Fo

Hydrocarbon chains are an excellent way to store energy - gasoline, diesel, propane, ethanol, butanol, etc. If you look at energy density from either a volumetric or mass basis, they're hard to beat. Super capacitors are nowhere near as energy dense, and Mr. Fusion is still only a Hollywood pipe dream.

Where you get your feedstock for the hydrocarbons and how you use them is the real trick. If you're intent on using fossil crude as a basis, you're going to be releasing lots of locked-up material into t

The problem is that the energy and even automotive manufacturing industry don't want the yoke taken off until the last minute. Why do you think there was such a push for ethanol and hyrdrogen fuel cells? Both of those still need you to fill up at a pump. Electric cars would be able to use a wide variety of energy sources as long as the end result was electric potential. This breaks your dependency on the industry for fuel, which they don't want.

to extract enough energy, the cyclist would be super buff, and thus roid crazy. i don't want even crazier cyclists on the road.

a simpler solution would be to require anybody who uses public roads to have a limited license (limited in the sense that it covers tested knowledge of road rules but not operation of a motor vehicle).

to extract enough energy, the cyclist would be super buff, and thus roid crazy. i don't want even crazier cyclists on the road.

a simpler solution would be to require anybody who uses public roads to have a limited license (limited in the sense that it covers tested knowledge of road rules but not operation of a motor vehicle).

Sounds like a regular driver's license in the States to me.

Knowledge of signs and traffic laws is just about all they test for. That's why so many idiots brake uphill, on banked curves, don't understand that you steer better when you're not also braking, don't know what "end speed limit" does and doesn't mean, tailgate, can't stay off the median in their SUVs, never heard of engine braking, think four-wheel-drive means they'll never oversteer on ice/snow, and don't understand what the left lane is for..

The sad thing is, if you have ever spent any significant time in many parts of the world (basically anywhere outside of The US/Canada and Northern/Western Europe), you would realize that American drivers are EASILY (and sadly) among the upper echelons of the world's drivers when it comes to knowledge and safety.

Try driving for a day among the "licensed" drivers of any country in South America, for example, and you will see what I mean.

No, they'll just be cruising through stop signs and red lights, or going down the lane against traffic further from home.You have an interesting idea, assuming it can generate enough juice to drive a car even a few miles, but it doesn't deal with the moronically suicidal asshats that make up far too large of a percentage of the bicyclists. (Hope you have a lower percentage than we do, I'd say ours is about 80%.)

Many street lights still use road sensors, which fail to detect smaller vehicles such as motorcycles and bicycles. As such, many municipalities (like my own) have adopted "dead on red" laws, which allow said vehicles to pass through red lights when it is safe to do so.

Stop signs are a different story, of course, but I see cars running those at least as often as I see cyclists do it.

...moronically suicidal asshats that make up far too large of a percentage of the bicyclists.

I'll admit my bias, but my experience has been quite the opposite. More often than not, it is the cars who do not know how t

While I agree entirely on your point #1, as a cyclist, I find myself taking some offense to your point #2. It is not the high speed traffic that is desirable, it is the efficiency of the road itself. Side roads, in general, do not typically go for more than a few blocks, and in my own experience are usually unsuitable for commuter use even for bicycles for all but near the departure and destination points.

FWIW, I usually cycle quite close to the curb, so I am easily and safely passed by other vehicles.

1) No man looks good in spandex. Maybe gay men think so, but I'm not a gay man and I really don't want to see this shit. If the cyclist is not a gay man, perhaps they don't want this kind of attention.

I shall assume that you are male. Let me tell you that my last couple of girlfriends would strongly disagree with your opinion, and I'm much more interested in their opinion than yours...:)

True, but not as much heat, as an ICE engine. A human has to struggle to keep itself warm (at 36ÂC), a car has to struggle to keep the cooling water from boiling.On a straight road you need maybe 150 Watt on a bike for 25kph if you've got a mountain bike with knobby tires, full suspension and a hub dynamo, even less than that on a road bike. You need 100 times as much power to move a car at the same speed.

Oxygen concentration cells work off anything that eats oxygen when it burns (and doesn't poison the fuel cell - which very few things do) and which is physically compatible with the fuel feed infrastructure.

For a cell designed for liquid fuels that's liquid hydrocarbons (gasoline, diesel fuel, salad oil, liquid fat,...), alcohols, and just about any other liquid fuel. If it also handles gas you can also use propane, hydrogen (if your plumbing is up to it), etc. Use a good enough feed system and you can r

If they could also shrink the cost by a factor of 10 we would have a winner.

It's called "economy of scale".

When they're being built in hundred-thousand lots by automated factories several model years into vehicle production, the design and tooling costs have been largely paid off, and some competitive product is bidding for customers which creates price pressure, they will cost a lot less than the parts in the concept-car prototype or the first model year.

The other advantage of using a fuel cell is that it makes it feasible to capture the CO2. In an ICE because you burn the fuel the concentration of CO2 in the exhaust is low, making it impracticable/expensive to capture the CO2.

In an oxygen-concentration fuel cell you burn the fuel to exhaust, just like in an engine. It's just that the oxygen is provided through the cell membrane on the way to the combustion, rather than being mixed (along with a lot of nitrogen and miscellaney) with the fuel before ignitio